Inside the Mission to Catch Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

By Terry McDermott & Josh Meyer

How the FBI, CIA, and Pakistani intelligence worked together -- or didn't -- in the global hunt for the mastermind behind September 11, 2001.

A side street in Karachi AP

KARACHI, Pakistan, Autumn 2002 -- Everything the Americans could
rustle up pointed to Karachi. Every source and bit of information said
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was operating out of the capital of Pakistan's
Wild West. Back at Langley, the CIA's newly formed "KSM targeting team"
had assembled a massive file on him that included all the disparate dots
that the U.S. government had previously failed to connect. By then, a
congressional joint inquiry was already cataloguing those failures. Once
the Pakistani security services started looking in earnest, they found
the same thing. Almost every Al Qaeda suspect they picked up in the last
year had some connection to Mohammed. Many of those arrested had no
links to one another, but they all knew Mohammed.

The Americans
knew Karachi was a much tougher target than almost anywhere else in
Pakistan, perhaps the world. Karachi in the best of times is a difficult
city. With its "no-go" zones, rampant organized crime, and seemingly
perpetual sectarian wars, it has been a kidnapping and murder capital
for years. Much as California localities post warnings on what to do in
case of an earthquake, bulletin boards in public buildings in Karachi
routinely display advice on what to do in case of a kidnapping.

It
is a mark of Karachi's cosmopolitanism that most of its millions of
citizens carry on life as if this underworld does not exist. In that
regard, it is in many ways no different from any other 21st century metropolis -- ungainly, exciting, raucous, difficult.
There are hip clubs with DJs, cool new restaurants with enigmatic names,
a burgeoning middle class. Kids ride bikes, markets hawk DVDs and
digital cameras, the bright shiny silks of upscale ladies-about-town
billow in the breeze. It is Pakistan's most progressive city, former
home to its first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and thousands
of women go about the city unescorted, unveiled, running errands, going
to jobs, lunch dates, and prenatal classes. Graduates of its university
engineering programs are prized in technology centers and other outposts
of the new world economy.

Still, especially after the 2002
murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, it seemed a woolly,
scary place to do business. Agents routinely felt they needed to run
what they called surveillance detection routes, SDRs, when they went to
and from their living quarters.

Suddenly, the man who had been nowhere for a decade was everywhere.

Raids, even when they were able
to mount them, didn't seem to produce much. Karachi was terribly
overbuilt. Much of the construction industry was controlled by the
military, and much of the military's money was illicit. It couldn't just
sit around; it had to be put to use. It built buildings whether the
market existed for them or not. So even a city that was growing an
average of 5 percent a year had a perpetually high rate of vacant
buildings. It made Karachi an easy place to hide. You could slip in and
out of empty places -- a new one every day if you wanted; you could rent
them for almost nothing. A series of raids in the spring and summer of
2002 had found a lot of empty flats.

. . .

In August, the
FBI caught a break when it questioned a brother-in-law of KSM, Abdul
Samad Din Muhammad, who had been arrested and questioned in the United
Arab Emirates in November 2001 and extradited to Pakistan in 2002.
Muhammad told FBI agents that Aziz Ali was in constant contact with his
uncle, KSM. He also said Aziz Ali received a constant stream of Arab
visitors from Pakistan at the airport and that Ali had suddenly bolted
from the UAE a day or two before the Sept. 11 attacks. He didn't have
his belongings together, but insisted on leaving. When Muhammad asked
Aziz Ali why he was in such a rush to leave, he didn't get a
satisfactory answer. FBI deputy legal attaché Jennifer Keenan, who was working closely on the case, was now certain that the way to get to KSM
was through his nephew.

More raids initially yielded nothing,
but in early September, the Pakistani police got lucky. Neighbors had
pointed out that there was an awful lot of traffic through a house in
the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighborhood. Police nabbed a man leaving the house
on his way to pay utility bills. Agents of the ISI investigated and
detained the man, a Saudi native, who said he managed the house. His
name was Mohammed Ahmad Rabbani. Rabbani's driver proved to be quite
talkative. He said Rabbani and his brother managed several similar
guesthouses, all of which had a constant stream of guests. He helpfully
gave police the addresses of the houses.

One of the houses was
nearby, on Tariq Road. Authorities raided it and found the brother
there, along with two other men, two women, and three children. They
also found 20 carefully wrapped passports and almost two dozen SEGA
game consoles that had been modified for use as detonators for
explosives. The passports were for members of Osama bin Laden's family.
The police interrogated the children to determine if they were bin
Laden's. One of the women was a caretaker, and one child was hers. Two
of the children were brothers. The other woman was a nanny to the
brothers -- and the man was her companion. The two boys, ages seven and
nine, were named Omar and Abdullah. No, they said, their father's name
was not bin Laden; it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The women were
caretakers and nannies. They couldn't say where Mohammed was, but they
knew there were large parties of Arab men at guesthouses in the Defence
Housing Authority, a generally upscale part of the city. The
intelligence agents also learned that the men staying there were
well-armed, and cautious. Rabbani had been instructed to rent the
apartment two months earlier and wait, but was given no further details.
The men had come one by one over a period of two weeks and had taken
precautions to avoid detection. Once inside, they hadn't left for a
month, while food, weapons and supplies were brought to them.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The
ISI retreated for the day. They contacted the Americans and organized
for operations the next morning. They moved in overnight with a large
assemblage of ISI, local Sindhi police, and Pakistani Army Rangers for
backup. The American embassy in Islamabad had gotten a call at about
8:00 a.m. that morning about a possible big fish in Karachi. The new FBI
legal attaché, Chuck Riley, dispatched Don Borelli, the WMD expert from
Dallas, and another agent on temporary duty from Kansas City, Dave Cudmore. "Grab
an overnight bag, head to Karachi, and haul ass," Riley told them. It
took until 2:00 p.m. to get there.

When they got to Karachi, the two agents were told to sit tight. The Pakistanis babysat the house through the night.

The
immediate neighborhood was just beyond the nicer sections of Defence;
it was a commercial-industrial tract full of five- and six-story
buildings, most with low-rent light-industry tenants: textile plants,
zipper and button factories, and small machine shops. The streets were
paved but the buildings were separated by bare dirt; they were shuttered
in the front with metal roll-up doors. The streets were empty and dark.

After dawn, they stopped the caretaker coming back from morning
prayers. He told them that the entire top floor, the fourth, was filled
with Arabs. They'd been there for two months, he said, and overpaid on
the rent. The soldiers moved in at sunrise and all hell broke loose.
Hundreds of rounds, hours of shooting and grenade throwing, and two dead
men later, the authorities secured the building. They searched room by
room, and in a storage space under a stairwell they found the man who
just weeks before had declared himself the coordinator of the September
11 attacks, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He and another man held knives to their
own throats, threatening to silence themselves before they could ever be
made to talk. But Pakistani agents jumped them, and wrestled them down.

They raided the second building as well, with much less incident.

When
the dust settled from the massive shootout at the Defence address,
Borelli and Cudmore were taken to ISI headquarters in Karachi. They had
put on their shalwar kameez, a traditional South Asian dress, before noticing that many of the ISI
officers wore Western clothes, some of them jeans.

"We don't need to blend in; you do," the Americans were told.

The combined team of Pakistanis and Americans swept the houses.

They
went to the location of the first shootout and found the place badly
damaged. They entered to find an unexploded grenade, IED components, and
a large cache of documents, including passports. It was late, so they
called it a night and hit the next location in the morning. By then, FBI
and CIA agents were on the lookout for Mukhtar. They were looking for
other al-Qaeda operatives, too, including Walid bin Attash. At the Tariq
Road location, they had found a prosthetic leg they thought was his.
They didn't know whether it was a spare, or if he'd left in such haste that
he had abandoned it.

The Americans processed the men who had
been detained. They fingerprinted them and asked them to hold up a piece
of cardboard with their names on it -- the closest thing to a mug shot
they could muster. Ramzi bin al-Shibh was much bigger than the Americans
had expected. He, too, had gained a lot of weight in his months of
hiding in Pakistan. Most of the others were sullen, even angry. But bin
al-Shibh had a smug look on his face. As Borelli took his picture, a CIA
officer asked him if he had made a video -- a reference to the martyrdom
tapes made by al-Qaeda fighters that were being found regularly on
raids, including one that was believed to have been his.

The
Pakistani officers questioned the men caught at the various locations,
including Rabbani. It was all very civilized. An ISI colonel served
Rabbani tea as they talked. It was more like a chat; nothing like the
rumored tales of ISI beatings of detainees. Rabbani described how he
paid the bills, and was sort of an administrator. On further
questioning, he said he was also watching KSM's children. At one point,
the kids were brought into the room. They were scared, but brightened up
after being given Coca-Colas.

"You have to help us out for the
sake of the kids," the ISI colonel said. Most of the questions focused
on KSM's whereabouts, and why was it that he wasn't at any of the
locations when the raids occurred. Rabbani didn't know. Neither did his
children, they said. KSM had vanished.

"We don't know how he did it. We wish we knew.''

The FBI men combed through
the buildings. They found automatic weapons, grenades, ammunition. They
found cell phones, address books, laptop hard drives, desktop
computers. KSM was not there. They had apparently just missed him at the
first house the previous day -- again possibly by just a matter of minutes
or hours. They found a letter he had signed "Mukh," for Mukhtar,
advising a subordinate about a future attack on a pair of hotels.

If
you were on the ground and asked, you could collect an address for KSM
from almost every person you talked to. He was here in Defence, in a
mansion. It was an apartment in Sharafabad, a mud hut in the swamp flats
of Korangi, in the Baluch colony of Lyari, in a third-floor walk-up in
that Arab neighborhood full of money changers and bucket shops. A man
who was arrested had a phone number for Mohammed that was traced to the
other end of town, a middle-class preserve of single-family homes with
clean modern lines, behind pale stucco walls.

Suddenly, the man who had been nowhere for a decade was everywhere.

Everybody
wanted to own the Ramzi bin al-Shibh capture. It was a huge score by
nearly every measure -- the numbers of people arrested, the cache of
materials recovered, the cooperation between the Pakistanis and the
Americans. There had been hundreds of previous raids, but none had
yielded the young children of an al-Qaeda captain or passports for a
large part of Osama bin Laden's family.

As much as everyone
involved wanted some credit for its successes, no one wanted even a
small piece of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape. The Pakistanis, in
particular, were confounded by Mohammed.

"Karachi can never
become a control center for al-Qaeda," one high-ranking ISI officer
said. "We have informers on every street. Our total concentration is on
Karachi, followed by Lahore, Faisalabad, and Peshawar, Quetta. That
vendor on the street? He can be working for us. We are covering every
street, every nook and corner. Let me tell you, you people have the
habit of over-exaggerating the importance of these people. This KSM, I
don't care a hoot about him. Their mobility has been brought to zero. We
have this highly sophisticated electronic gadgetry, we have the
[National] Crisis Management Cell center, we have PISCES [the
U.S.-originated Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation
System] ... and can tell anybody going in and out." The obvious question,
of course, was that if the ISI had Pakistan so well covered, how had KSM
been allowed to build the al-Qaeda network there before September 11 in
the first place, and then rebuild it once again afterward?

Belief
in their own infallibility was so deep that several top Pakistani
military and intelligence officials maintained for months afterward
that, in fact, KSM had been captured -- or, if not captured, killed. There
were news reports that he was lying in state in a morgue; one senior
government official told a journalist that KSM's "widow" had been
returned to Egypt.

Pakistan as a society was accustomed to
dealing with imperfect information about almost everything. It was often
supposed that much public discourse was intended to mislead or obscure.
Analysts routinely assumed as a starting point that a piece of public
information was untruthful and proceeded from there, trying to discern
in what way it was a lie, why it was told, and what it meant. In this
case, one conclusion that could be drawn was that although the
authorities had nearly caught KSM, they now had no idea exactly where he
was.

KSM wasn't, of course, dead or captured; once again, he had
somehow gotten away. No matter how close the call -- one Pakistani
intelligence officer likened it to a Hollywood Western in which the good
guys arrive to find the campfire coals still burning but their quarry
gone -- the raid was a failure in that sense. But every raid told KSM's
pursuers something, and this one had validated the broader notion that
KSM had been in Karachi and that he had built a substantial
infrastructure there.

All the evidence that had pointed to the
sprawling city -- Yosri Fouda's interview and the resulting satellite
intercepts; raids on other safe houses, one of which yielded copies of
several 9/11 hijackers' passports; evidence from Ganczarski, Zubaydah,
Padilla, and Guantanamo detainees -- had been correct. Connections to every al-Qaeda plot ran through the city. The ISI's claims notwithstanding,
Karachi was a hub. More, Karachi was the hub.

No one could say
how Mohammed escaped. Some American agents believed the presence of the
children at the house suggested he'd been tipped off and fled in haste.
Why else would he leave the children there? But there were other
indications that Mohammed had set up a system of care for the children
so he could pop in for playtime with them whenever possible. A woman
caretaker found with the children indicated she was hired by KSM to
provide them with an education.

KSM's escape stoked already
considerable U.S. fears that he was being protected by elements within
the Pakistani police, military, and intelligence agencies. Such fellow
travelers, Keenan and others surmised, had probably been harboring
KSM in Pakistan and around the world -- even as the FBI had ratcheted up
its efforts to find him. His "wanted" posters had been up all over the
world for years, and he had been on dozens of watchlists. Yet he seemed
to wander with ease, and without fear.

In photos found at the
house with his children, KSM was dressed in traditional Muslim tunic and
kaffiyeh. He was shown with "at least one wife'' and several more
children besides the two sons. In many of them, the children were
smiling, and KSM was too.

To those entrusted with finding him,
KSM remained a cipher. "We know less about him than any of the
others,'' a senior FBI official said. "He was under everybody's radar.
We don't know how he did it. We wish we knew.''

One of the prizes
in the bin al-Shibh raid was a large suitcase that contained a virtual
road map of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's life, including bank records and
his neatly framed diploma from North Carolina A&T. That piece of
paper became another battle in the turf war between FBI and CIA agents,
with the FBI wanting to keep it as evidence and accusing a senior CIA
officer of putting it on the wall of his Karachi office as some sort of
trophy or conversation piece. The disagreement spoke volumes about the
rapidly deteriorating relationship between the two U.S. agencies after
CIA station chief Bob Grenier's departure, a time when the CIA increasingly
tried to keep its raids and seizures away from the FBI's Jennifer
Keenan, whose confrontations with the agency were growing ever more
bitter.

Grenier and Keenan had trusted one another and built a
relationship, guarded as it was. The CIA veteran appreciated the value
of keeping the FBI in the loop and bringing a law enforcement agent on
each raid team, if for no other reason than to gather evidence for
possible prosecutions. His replacement who we'll call Vance, had a far
less inclusive view of the role the FBI should play in the war on
terror. Keenan's difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that
Reimann's replacement as FBI legal attaché in June 2002, Chuck Riley,
went along with the CIA's plan. Riley operated from a position of some
weakness, as he had virtually no counter-terrorism background; his last
post had been in Sacramento, Calif.

The situation boiled over
when Keenan pushed to travel from Islamabad to Karachi to participate in
the interrogation of bin al-Shibh. When Vance refused, Keenan appealed
to Washington and he was overturned. The veteran Al Qaeda expert was
allowed to attend. But when Keenan got there, she was told to sit and be
quiet while a CIA interrogator asked questions. Keenan fumed to
headquarters that because the CIA was running the show, efforts to
follow up on KSM's bank records and other documents that could lead to
him were ignored. That was especially frustrating given the treasures
agents found in Mohammed's huge, tattered, taped-together suitcase.
Besides the photos, authorities also found bank statements, financial
and operational records. "It was his life's stuff,'' said one agent on
scene. "Anything that was important to him was in there.''

One great value of the luggage was as evidence that KSM was in touch
with bin Laden and his family, and on the move. He wasn't fixed, but
mobile. To transport and shelter the Al Qaeda exodus through Karachi,
KSM had built a network of safe houses. One estimate put the number as
high as fifty. That network now gave him a lifeline.

As a blow to
KSM's ambitions, the capture of bin al-Shibh turned out to be
insignificant. Bin al-Shibh was a key figure in the 9/11 plot, relaying
instructions to the hijackers and passing their information back to
Mohammed, but he was a functionary, not a mover in that plot or any
other.

What his pursuers didn't know yet was that at the very
time their hunt for him was at its most intense -- and in some respects, at
its most promising -- KSM was busier than ever plotting and orchestrating
attacks in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the United States.